This Is Why We Need More People Working in Cuneiform: The ‘Ark Tablet’

[truthBtold]

So, we can guess that you are not one of the people who can read it?

I wanna eat it!!!

[Creed of Heresy]

The process of religion is not to admit it's wrong when faced with evidence showing it is, but rather to square the circle and desperately try to grasp at straws to try to prove itself correct.

[KichigaiNeko]

Oooooooooooooooooo get an eye ball of this!

Was the ark round? A Babylonian description discovered
Irving Finkel, curator, British Museum

I’ve just come from the press conference launching my new book, The Ark Before Noah. As I told the journalists, it all started with a fairly normal event for a museum curator: a member of the public bringing in an object that had long been in their family to have it identified. As often happens in my case, it was a cuneiform tablet. The visitor, Douglas Simmonds, had been given it by his father for passing his exams. It was part of a modest collection: a few tablets, some cylinder seals, a lamp or two and some pieces from China and Egypt. His father, an inveterate curio hunter, had picked them up after the War in the late 1940s.



This tablet, however, turned out to be one in a million. The cuneiform was a sixty-line passage from the ancient Babylonian Story of the Flood. This story had been well known since the 1870s, when George Smith, a brilliant decipherer who worked at the British Museum, first identified the story known from the Book of Genesis in a seventh-century cuneiform tablet from Nineveh. The two accounts – Babylonian and biblical – were closely related. The new tablet, however, written in about 1750 BC, has startling new contents.

When the gods decided to wipe out mankind with a flood, the god Enki, who had a sense of humour, leaked the news to a man called Atra-hasis, the ‘Babylonian Noah,’ who was to build the Ark. Atra-hasis’s Ark, however was round. To my knowledge, no one has ever thought of that possibility. The new tablet also describes the materials and the measurements to build it: quantities of palm-fibre rope, wooden ribs and bathfuls of hot bitumen to waterproof the finished vessel. The result was a traditional coracle, but the largest the world had ever dreamed of, with an area of 3,600 sq. metres (equivalent to two-thirds the area of a football pitch), and six-metre high walls. The amount of rope prescribed, stretched out in a line, would reach from London to Edinburgh!

Oh My Grey Glob! The rest of the article is HERE

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I'm unsure how finding an earlier version of a myth which differs so greatly from the later version lends any factual basis to either version. It's as if someone had found an old vellum telling us that Robin Hood's girl was called 'Miriam' instead of 'Marian'.

Boru

[KichigaiNeko]

I'm unsure how finding an earlier version of a myth which differs so greatly from the later version lends any factual basis to either version. It's as if someone had found an old vellum telling us that Robin Hood's girl was called 'Miriam' instead of 'Marian'.

Boru

The FACT that it is an earlier version of an Abrahamic myth lends weight to the fact that the current bunch of sheeple bleating about their deity's omnipotence is really just a bunch of uneducated fools bleating about how great their current oppressor is


Above that all is the fact that this tablet is being deciphered and clearly supports the presumption that the so called Torah, Bible, Koran are nothing more than stolen mythologies from a previous (and far superior) society.

[Minimalist]

I'm unsure how finding an earlier version of a myth which differs so greatly from the later version lends any factual basis to either version. It's as if someone had found an old vellum telling us that Robin Hood's girl was called 'Miriam' instead of 'Marian'.

Boru

All this shit began as oral tales. The idea is that the older manuscripts are closer to the original. Ehrman uses the concept to trash the gospel manuscripts.

[Assimilate]

don't worry guys, fox news is on the case.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/01/2...prototype/

[Creed of Heresy]

Faux Noise does such a great job of maintaining their journalistic integrity and keeping their reporting free of bias.

---

I'm sorry, I started laughing hysterically and forgot to put the sarcasm tabs on.

[Minimalist]

Actually....

"I'm sure the story of the flood and a boat to rescue life is a Babylonian invention," he said.

He believes the tale was likely passed on to the Jews during their exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C. And he doesn't think the tablet provides evidence the ark described in the Bible existed. He said it's more likely that a devastating real flood made its way into folk memory, and has remained there ever since.

"I don't think the ark existed -- but a lot of people do," he said. "It doesn't really matter. The Biblical version is a thing of itself and it has a vitality forever.

If their normal audience of xtian fuckwits had attention spans longer than that of a gnat and got to the end of the article they would be having a shitfit over these comments.

Jesus freaks don't ever want to hear stuff like this. I imagine someone at FOX is out looking for a new job about now.

[Creed of Heresy]

Holy shit, the article WAS unbiased?!

SOMEONE GET THAT DUDE A JOB AT THE FUCKING DAILY SHOW RIGHT NOW.